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SpaceX’s orbital Starship launch debut may be pushed to 2022 by slow FAA reviews
In a rare sign of material progress, SpaceX and the FAA have finally released what is known as a draft environmental assessment (EA) of the company’s South Texas Starship launch plans.
Set to be the largest and most powerful rocket in spaceflight history when it first begins orbital launches, the process of acquiring permission to launch Starship and its Super Heavy booster out of the wetlands of the South Texas coast was never going to be easy. The Boca Chica site SpaceX ultimately settled on for its first private launch facilities – initially meant for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy but later dedicated to BFR (now Starship) – is simultaneously surrounded by sensitive coastal habitats populated by several threatened or endangered species and situated mere miles as the crow flies from a city whose temporary population oscillates from a few thousand to tens of thousands.
Reception and analysis of the draft and its timing have been mixed. On one hand, SpaceX’s draft EA – completed with oversight from the FAA and help from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) – gives a number of reasons for optimism. In a sign that SpaceX is taking a pragmatic approach to the inevitable environmental review and launch license approval hurdles standing in front of orbital South Texas Starship launches, the company has actually pursued what is known as a “programmatic environmental assessment” (PEA).
Most importantly, that means that SpaceX’s Starbase PEA – if approved – will be more like a foundation or stepping stone that should make it easier to start small and methodically expand the scope and nature of the company’s plans for Boca Chica. Along those lines, as part of Starbase’s first dedicated environmental assessment, SpaceX has proposed a maximum of 23 flight operations annually while Starship is still in the development phase, including up to 20 suborbital Starship test flights and 3 orbital launches (or Super Heavy hops). Once SpaceX has worked out enough kinks for slightly more confident Starship operations, the company would enter an “operational phase” that would allow for as many as five suborbital Starship launches and five orbital Starship launches, as well as ship and booster landings back on land after all 10 possible launches.
In other words, SpaceX’s initial draft PEA is extremely conservative, requesting permission for what amounts to a bare minimum concept of operations for orbital Starship launches. At a maximum of 3-5 orbital launches per year, a PEA and subsequent launch license approved as-is would likely give SpaceX just enough slack to perform basic Earth orbit launches and no more than one or two orbital refilling tests per year. However, as an example, a five-launch maximum would almost entirely prevent SpaceX from launching Starship to Mars, the Moon, and maybe even high-energy Earth orbits without using all of its annual launch allotments on a single mission.
Perhaps most importantly, the draft PEA as proposed would unequivocally prevent SpaceX from performing the NASA Human Lander System (HLS) Moon landings it received an almost $3 billion contract to complete. Each HLS Starship Moon landing is expected to require anywhere from 10-16 launches to deliver a depot ship, HLS lander, and ~1200 tons of propellant to orbit. However, in terms of SpaceX’s prospects of developing Starship as quickly as possible, that’s actually a good thing. Above all else, SpaceX’s slimmed-down draft PEA should be far easier for the FAA to approve than a PEA pursuing permission for Starship’s ultimate ambitions – dozens to hundreds of launches annually – from the beginning. In theory, with this barebones PEA approved, SpaceX would then be able to build off the foundation with additional environmental assessments – like, for example, of expanding Starship’s maximum launch cadence.
Of course, SpaceX first needs the FAA turn this first draft PEA into a favorable environmental assessment (not a guarantee) before any of the above starts to matter. Based on the content of the draft itself and associated appendixes, SpaceX appears to have a decent shot at receiving a “finding of no significant impact (FONSI)” or “mitigated FONSI” determination. However, SpaceX began the process of creating that draft as far back as mid-2020, followed by an FAA announcement in November 2020. The implication is that the FAA managed to drag out a draft release process that some have estimated should have taken 3-4 months into an arduous 10-15 month ordeal.
Combined with the uphill battle it’s starting to look like SpaceX will have to wage for an orbital Starship launch license in South Texas, it’s looking increasingly likely that Starship, Super Heavy, and Starbase will be technically ready for orbital launch tests well before the FAA is ready to approve or license them. Barring delays, the public now has until mid-October to read and comment on SpaceX’s draft PEA, after which the FAA and SpaceX will review those comments and hopefully turn the draft into a completed review. Even if the FAA were to somehow take just two months to return a best-case FONSI, clearing Starbase of environmental launch hurdles, it’s hard to imagine that the agency could then turn around and approve an orbital Starship launch license – or even a one-off experimental permit – in the last few weeks of 2021.
Ultimately, that means that nothing short of a minor miracle is likely to prevent the FAA’s environmental review and licensing delays from directly delaying Starship’s orbital launch debut. There is at least a chance that Starship, Super Heavy, and Starbase’s orbital launch site wont be ready for orbital launches by the end of the year, but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine that all three won’t be proof tested, qualified, and ready for action just a month or two from now. For the time being, we’ll just have to wait and see where the cards fall.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
